Holy sputtering space rocks! Earlier this week, a team in Argentina excavated a monster: a 30-ton chunk of what is very probably an iron-nickel meteorite.

Named "Gancedo" after a nearby town, the rock was found in the heart of the known Campo del Cielo ("Field of Heaven" in Spanish) meteorite strewnfield. A team from the local Astronomy Association of Chaco dug the huge rock out of the ground on September 10th, and images of the find soon flooded the internet.

“While we hoped for weights above what had been registered, we did not expect it to exceed 30 tons,” Mario Vesconi (Astronomy Association of Chaco) told the Xinhua news service. “The size and weight [of Gancedo] surprised us.” For comparison, the legal maximum gross vehicle weight for an 18-wheeler in the United States is 40 tons.

The team admits it'll take time to weigh the meteorite more precisely. The find will most likely end up ranking as the second-largest meteorite recovered from Campo del Cielo in the Chaco province of northern Argentina, after the 37-ton "El Chaco" uncovered in 1980.

Mammoth Meteorites

And the biggest space rock ever recovered? That title still safely belongs to the Hoba meteorite in Namibia, estimated to weigh more than 60 tons. This measurement is difficult to make because Hoba has never been moved from its discovery site. This massive chunk of iron fell to Earth around 80,000 years ago and is now a tourist attraction, still half-buried in the ground.

The Astronomy Association of Chaco team poses in front of their enormous space rock.Ministerio de Gobierno, Justicia y Relación con la Comunidad

Gancedo's fall to Earth occurred between 4,000 and 6,000 years ago. Locals knew of the fall for centuries, even making iron tools from meteorites found in the strewnfield. In the 16th century, the Spanish became interested in stories of a piece of iron that fell from the sky, and in 1774 don Bartolomé Francsico de Maguna led an expedition that came across a mass of iron, referred to as Mesón de Fierro ("Table of Iron" in Spanish). Another 1,400-pound fragment from Campo del Cielo named Otumpa now resides at the British Museum in London. With more than 100 tons of meteorite recovered, Campo del Cielo is the top producer in terms of pure meteorite mass worldwide.

The Campo del Cielo strewnfield extends over an ellipse 3 km wide by 19 km long over an area northwest of Buenos Aires, and meteorites found here have a polycrystalline coarse octahedrite composition characteristic of iron-nickel meteorites. They are also unusually pure even among iron-nickel meteorites, consisting of 93% iron. Most of the remaining 7% is nickel, and less than 1% are trace elements.

The illicit meteorite trade surrounding Campo del Cielo has also made the news in the past few years, with arrests just last year by Argentine officials of four smugglers trying to take a ton of meteorites out of the country. Hopefully, Gancedo will prove too large to steal and find its fitting place in meteorite science and history.

About David Dickinson

David Dickinson is a freelance science writer, high school science teacher, retired enlisted U.S. Air Force veteran and avid stargazer. He currently resides with his wife Myscha in the Tampa Bay area and Florida. David also writes science fiction in his spare time, and shares the universe and more on his own website, www.astroguyz.com.

3 thoughts on “Huge Meteorite “Gancedo” Found in Argentina”

Wiki has the info I requested here:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campo_del_Cielo
About halfway down under the heading:
The meteorite impact, age and composition
A crater field of at least 26 craters was found in the area, with the largest being 115×91 meters. The field covered an area of 3×18.5 kilometers with an associated strewn area of smaller meteorites extending farther by about 60 kilometres (37 mi). At least two of the craters contained thousands of small iron pieces. Such an unusual distribution suggests that a large body entered the Earth’s atmosphere and broke into pieces which fell to the ground. The size of the main body is estimated as larger than 4 meters in diameter. The fragments contain an unusually high density of inclusions for an iron meteorite, which might have facilitated the disintegration of the original meteorite. Samples of charred wood were taken from beneath the meteorite fragments and analyzed for carbon-14 composition. The results indicate the date of the fall to be around 4,200–4,700 years ago, or 2,200–2,700 years BC.

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